Embodiments relate generally to data center equipment, and more particularly to architectures, apparatus and methods for data center systems having a switch core and edge devices.
Known architectures for data center systems involve overly involved and complex approaches that increase the costs and latency of such systems. For example, some known data center networks consist of three or more layers of switches where Ethernet and/or Internet Protocol (IP) packet processing is performed at each layer. Packet processing and queuing overhead unnecessarily repeated at each layer directly increases the costs and end-to-end latency. Similarly, such known data center networks do not typically scale in a cost effective manner: an increase in the number servers for a given data center systems often requires the addition of ports, and thus the addition of more devices, at each layer of the data center systems. Such poor scalability increases the cost of such data center systems.
Thus, a need exists for improved data center systems including improved architectures, apparatus and methods.